Tips, tutorials & inspiration for making slideshows

slide styles

Do you have a son or daughter, friend or loved one graduating soon? Graduation is a wonderful and exciting time in a young person’s life. Many people make graduation slideshows to commemorate the occasion, showcasing the graduate’s life and milestones in photos and videos to share with friends and family at a graduation party or online. Continue reading →

Mother’s Day is just around the corner! Making a personalized video slideshow for Mother’s Day is super fast and easy with ProShow slideshow tools! Just drop your favorite photos into ProShow, add a song she’ll love, then create! Make it extra memorable with our free ‘Floral Sketch’ instant slideshow effects – they’ll give your photo & text slides a beautiful handdrawn floral look! Watch the sample video below and download them today! Continue reading →

The all-new ProShow Gold 6 delivers an impressive set of new creative tools —including blur, vignettes, adjustment effects, saturation boost + caption motion effects. These new features introduce an invigorating creative energy to ProShow Gold and offer so many new possibilities for polishing up your slideshows — plus, they’re really easy to use!

To see the new tools in action, let’s create an effect that you can use as a beautiful title slide for your next slideshow.

Create a Polished Title Effect

The blurred background trick

Start by creating a new slide using any photo you want. The easiest way to do this is to drag-n-drop a photo into the slide list. (Note: For this specific how-to example, horizontally-oriented images will work better than vertical portrait images)

Set your slide time to 3.0 seconds. In our example, the intro & ending transitions are 1.0 second.

Double-click on the slide to open up Slide Options. Click on the Layer Settings tab and change the Scaling option to Fill Frame.

Click on the Effects tab > Click on the Starting Position preview (on the left) to make it active. Set the Blur settings to 100%. If you want the blurred image to be more vibrant, set the Saturation to 100% as well. Leave the Ending Position unchanged (at 0% Blur / 0% Saturation).

If you would like, add a zoom effect to the background for a little extra energy. (Try setting the Starting zoom to 145% and leave the Ending zoom at 100%).

The blur tool minimizes the focus of any image — a very handy and strategic option for creating soft, rich backgrounds for text and photos, without drawing too much attention to itself. The blurred background trick also adds fullness, depth and color that solid color backgrounds do not have.

Add a custom vignette border to photos

Add a new layer by clicking the (+) button in the Layers list (left-hand column in Slide Options. Select a photo to add. This will be positioned on the left side of your slide.

Make sure the new layer is the top layer in the list (layer 1).

Click on the Layer Settings tab >Set the Zoom at 60%. Change the position to -50 x 0.

Customize your vignette photo border. Set the Vignette Type to ‘Solid Color’. Change the color to white. Set the Vignette Size to 8%. Check the boxes for ‘Solid borders’ and ‘Fill corners’. Click OK to exit the vignette settings window.

Right-click on Layer 1 (the vignetted image) and select ‘Duplicate Layer’. This will create a copy of the original layer, retaining all current settings so that we don’t have to repeat the same setup steps.

Right-click on the new duplicate layer (either one is fine – they are identical) and select ‘Select File’ to replace the current photo with a new photo. Select any photo you’d like. (Note: Again, it’s best to pick horizontal images for this example, and ideally the photos should have very similar proportions (i.e. aspect ratio) for symmetry). The new photo will appear to be covering up the other photo underneath it.

Click on the Layer Settings tab > Change the position to 50 x 0 (this will move the layer directly opposite of the original layer).

Add text with a zoom caption motion effect

Add a caption by clicking the (+) button in the Captions list (left-hand column in Slide Options. Enter a title or caption in the ‘Selected Caption Text’ box. In this example, we’ll type ‘Vacation 2014’, with a line break after ‘Vacation’ to break it into two lines of text.

Click the Effects tab to set the motion for your caption > To create a zoom-in effect for the title, set the Ending Position font size number so it is larger than the Starting position font size. For a faster, more dramatic or playful zoom motion, make the Ending font size a bigger number. For a subtler effect, make the number only slightly greater than the Starting font size.

In this example, we’ll use 36pt for the Starting font size, and 48 pt for the ending font size. (Note: To set Starting or Ending position values, you must click on the corresponding preview window to edit any associated values. (For extra polish, I also selected Fade-in / Fade-out effects under ‘Caption Behaviors’).

Preview the effect to see the results > Click the play button at the bottom of the Slide Options window or in the Main Preview.

For an even more dynamic look, you can change up the Starting / Ending position and rotation for captions as well. The new caption motion effects offer a new degree of flexibility in styling your text that allows you to create subtler or more dramatic effects than ever before.

Create Your Own Custom Variations
Now that you have this new title effect setup, you can fine-tune it however you like. Create new variations with simple changes to the font, or adding a fade-to-grayscale effect (using a similar technique as the blurred background (except altering the Colorize settings for start / end). You can also try adding motion effects to the two foreground images or remove one of the foreground images and offset the title to one side (opposite the main foreground image) to produce a new layout.

And don’t forget — you can always save any slide as a Slide Style in order to re-use the effect in other slides or slideshows. (For more details on how to Create a Slide Style, click here).

Get ProShow 6 Today!

Looking for a quick, easy way to dress up your slideshows? You’ll love the new instant slide styles that come built-in to ProShow Gold + Producer 6.

Enjoy tons of new options for titles, captions, photos and videos, including new collage styles + full length, zero motion and text layer effects. Below is a round-up of our 6 favorite new effects built-into ProShow 6!

1. Soft Edge

Features a soft vignette edge with a thin white outline and zoom-in motion against your choice of a light or dark base. Gives your show an ethereal feel and makes it look as though your photos are floating on the screen.

2. Vignette Blend

Features a dark or light vignetted background image with the main image slowly zooming to the front of the slide. Perfect for a wide-variety of shows and utilizes the full screen to give your shows more impact.

3. Fill Frame Title

The Fill Frame Title effect features a title heading & subheading over a vignetted background image. The dark vignette makes your text stand out and works as an excellent title slide for any slideshow. Try changing up the font(s) and font size to complement the style of your show!

4. Collage

Give your slide a collage-like look with the new Collage series of effects. Choose from light and dark options and still vs zoom motion. This is an excellent choice when working with portrait and square images. Producer 6 users get a few extra variations for 2 and 3-photo collage combinations.

5. Depth Pan

Depth Pan features a large panning image in the foreground and blurred background images, against either a light or dark base. A beautiful choice for landscape or portrait photos.

6. Text Layer Titles

Exclusive to Producer 6 is a series of Text Layer slide styles. Choose from tilted title styles and bold, numeric year titles masked against blurred backgrounds. These are perfect for adding dramatic, stylized text to any slideshow. Use the numeric year effects when creating shows for high school seniors, anniversaries, memorials, reunions and end-of-year recaps.

Look for these and many other new built-in effects under the Slide Styles dialog in ProShow 6. Click on the ‘Slide Styles – Built-In’ category to browse the new effects.

Get ProShow 6 Today!

Ready to get started on your holiday and end-of-year slideshows? We’ve got just the thing for the job! Our FREE ‘Holiday Photo Card’ effects for ProShow 5+ let you add festive holiday title greetings to any slideshow. Looks just like the holiday cards you get in the mail, but better! Choose from 3 fun designs! Compatible with ProShow Gold 5+, ProShow Producer 5+ and ProShow Web. Continue reading →

Fall is here and what better way to add some seasonal flair to your slideshows than with these falling leaves effects. This set was originally offered as part of our reunions promotion, but are the perfect complement for your fall or nature-themed slideshows. If you haven’t downloaded them yet, now’s your chance! Continue reading →